HWBOT Articles

The quest to find out which country has the best overclockers in the world in 2016 is almost upon us. The HWBOT Country Cup 2016 kicks off in just a matter of days, pitting country against country across six gruelling stages that promise to be the truest test of overclocking pedigree. The contest starts on November 1st and closes the day before Christmas eve with prizes, as well as lots of kudos lined up for the winners.

In previous years we’ve seen wins from Romania (2x), Poland and Greece, but in 2013, 2014 and 2015 the Australians were the top global force to be reckoned with, producing three displays of such dominance that they barely dropped a point. Will they be in the ascendancy once again in 2016, or are their natives of other countries willing to put their OC creedance on the line and go for the win? Could Germany finally flex their OC teamwork muscles, or perhaps the US will find a winning team ethic. And let’s not underestimate the Belgians after their recent Team Cup exploits. An intriguing battle lies ahead, that is the only certainty.

October 1, 2016 Taipei, Taiwan - HWBOT, an organization regulating international Overclocking competitions and rankings today officially announces the World Championship Final to held in Berlin, Germany on the 4th of December 2016. The World Championship Finals pits the winners from each of the HWBOT World Series winners, plus a wild card and a ROG Camp entrant, against each other in a bid to find out who is Overclocking Champion of the World in 2016.

The World Championship Final is truly a quest to find the best live OC contest player of the year. The contest features the six World Series winners from each of the six HWBOT World Tour 2016 events. The six World Series winners will be flown out to the Final and will be joined by the winner of the HWBOT World Championship Wild Card Contest winner. The eighth contestant will be the winner of the ROG Camp 2016, just to add some new blood and spice things up a touch.

Both HWBOT World Championship Wild Card winner and the ROG Camp 2016 winner will be announced at a later date.

Last week we wrapped up the final stop of the World Tour 2016 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The global tour featured six events and spanned five different continents. It was a success in every sense of the word. We connected with 627 overclockers worldwide, the majority of whom were new to the scene. The tradeshows and gaming events we visited had an accumulated attendance of over 250,000 people, and we reached over 150,000 people via livestreams on Twitch. Hundreds of articles appeared across the web and the response from the participants was overwhelmingly positive in most cases. It was great and I look forward to next year!

Choosing Indonesia as the last stop of the World Tour has a symbolic meaning too. It was in 2014 that we understood we needed to put a lot of effort into pushing amateur overclocking, through reaching-out to enthusiasts and running OC workshops. It was at the same tradeshow (Yogyakomtek) that we witnessed the power of JagatReview’s Amateur OverClocking Tournament (AOCT). Throughout the week I enjoyed seeing new amateurs push the Core i5 6600K to its limits as well as witnessing the five new extreme overclockers who attend the World Series competition. Perhaps the most inspiration I found however, was in conversations with Dedy and Alva from JagatReview and Benny from GIGABYTE’s distributor in Indonesia; three people who were right there at the beginning of (competitive) overclocking in Indonesia, in the year 2000.

September 1st, 2016, Taipei, Taiwan - HWBOT, an organization regulating international Overclocking competitions and rankings today announces Intel as primary partners for the Asia Pacific leg of the HWBOT World Tour which will be held in conjunction with JagatReview at the Yogyakomtek event in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Overclockers will compete on Intel Core i5 6600K processors for the duration of the event which is supported by Intel. Primary partner Intel is joined by motherboard partners ASUS, BIOSTAR, GIGABYTE and MSI, with power supplies from Seasonic, memory from Corsair, displays from Phillips and Open Benchtables from Streacom.

"Once again we are fortunate to have the help and support of some of the industry’s most respected hardware manufacturers for the HWBOT World Tour stop in Indonesia," commented Pieter-Jan Plaisier, Director at HWBOT. "We are excited to join with JagatReview and integrate the influential Amateur Overclocking Contest (AOCT) into the HWBOT World Tour schedule, an undeniable source of Indonesian overclocking talent."

The Asia Pacific leg of the HWBOT World Tour 2016 was confirmed a week ago. Today we can bring you an update about the rules and format of the World Series contest that will take place during the event. The Asia Pacific leg of the World Tour will largely follow the same structure that has been employed throughout the year with Amateur and Extreme World Series contests running side by side. In Indonesia however the Amateur contest will be integrated with the AOCT (Amateur OverClocking Tournament) organised and regulated by the staff at JagatReview (see below).

Hardware news

As you may well already be aware, GIGABYTE we rumored recently to have made the decision to expand their high-end Gaming brand Aorus to certain motherboard models. The DigiTimes reported that the company would beginning selling motherboards under the new Aorus brand starting from January next year. It seems that these rumors have now been confirmed with images of a their forthcoming Z270-Gaming 7 motherboard surfacing onVideoCardz.com

Firstly it’s obvious that this is in fact a Z270 chipset board that is optimized to work with Intel’s forthcoming Kaby Lake architecture CPUs. We can expect a full launch of these boards at CES 2017. How many in the Z270 series will remain GIGABYTE branded remains to be seen. The other things that is apparent is exactly how the company plans to elevate the Aorus brand to compete with ASUS’ ROG branding and MSI’s GAMING series. It certainly underlines how the DIY PC components industry remains obsessed with reaching out to PC gamers as a potentially lucrative consumer group. It’s also interesting to see how Aorus as a brand is well highlighted on the both PWM and chipset heatsinks – however the GIGABYTE logo remains discretely displayed on both box and board, so there will no confusion about who actually makes the product.

Regarding the design of the Z270-Gaming 7 itself, it certainly has plenty bling for gamers to enjoy. In terms of hardware design it doesn’t actually look too different from current Z170 offerings. One thing is for sure, they’re not holding back on LEDs. The packaging however does look pretty attractive with a single Aorus logo offering a pretty minimalist look that we probably haven’t seen since the X58A-OC back in the day.

It seems like the NDA that Intel has in place for their forthcoming Kaby Lake architecture CPUs is in virtual tatters. UK tech writers Bit-Tech have followed Tom’s Hardware and published a pretty exhaustive preview article focused on the Intel Core i7 7700k. As well running benchmarks and giving a thorough overview of the new platform, they also took the time to push the new chip to see exactly how well it overclocks. What they found using an early sample and a Z170 board was that the Core i7 7700K managed to reach 5.1GHz pulling 1.44v. Using a Corsair H105 CPU cooler the chip reached temperatures in excess of 90 degrees C.

“…we managed to get our sample to 5.1GHz - the best result we've seen for an age and even better than we managed with Sandy Bridge. Sure, this did need a hefty 1.44V and temperatures were edging into the 90s using Prime95's small FFTs test for stress testing with a Corsair H105 CPU cooler, but there is a glimmer of hope here that we may be dealing with a rather decent overclocker when it comes to Kaby Lake. Indeed, with a 300MHz higher boost speed out the gate starters and an improved manufacturing process, you'd kind of hope that there was some extra headroom anyway.”

Of course these preliminary findings are far from conclusive. We’re not exactly sure what motherboard was used during testing, but for sure it will have been a Z170 chipset board. Although these are compatible, the BIOSes will not yet be optimized for performance. The chip they used is also not final retail silicon, a fact that may also affect the findings.

Today is a Thursday of course which means it’s once again a time to take a trip down memory lane. Let’s take you back almost exactly ten years ago to the day in December in 2007. HWBOT managed to get an interview with one of the more influential and respected members of the community – MaSell, a Polish Overclocker who started Overclocking as early as 2001. Here’s a sample of the interview which was published on December 7th, 2007:

HWBOT: Okay, first question, obviously, please tell us a bit more about yourself.

MaSell: My name is Mateusz (Matthew), I’m living in Olsztyn, Poland. I’m almost 20 years old. My hobby is OC … but hey! Everyone knows that, next question please :-).

HWBOT: Okay … you’re right. Next question then: How and when did you start overclocking?

MaSell: Some time ago, I guess 2001 or 2002 I read an article about overclocking in PC magazine. I tried it out on my GF2MX400… and it worked as I hit almost 3000points in 3DMark 2001! Incredible score :-). The first cpu with I overclocked, was my Athlon Thunderbird 1333MHz. I had problems to do it, because of my ECS motherboard which didn’t have any oc options in the bios. In 2003-2004 I flashed a modified bios and overclocked cpu to 1467MHz, entirely stable. This board still works in my friend pc!

HWBOT: Does your work/studies have something to do with computing hardware and/or overclocking?

MaSell: I study IT, but unfortunately that’s only about software, not hardware. Why can’t I study overclocking?

HWBOT: That’s a question many of us ask, I think. We all know Mr. Rocha admires 3DMark01, but what are our favourite benchmarks?

MaSell: SuperPI and 3DMark 2001SE for sure. I know it’s old, but these are still one of the most precious benchmarks around. You can use it to bench from Pentium 75MHz to QX9770, from PCI Riva to Tri Sli 8800Ultra monsters. I really like SPI, this is the mother (or father, who know?) of all benchmarks. If you know how to tweak your operating system for spi, you know how to tweak your OS for other benchmark. So next to Superpi, we have the oldie: 3DMark 2001. Why? It’s not as simple as the 2005 or 2006 editions, where you must only overclock, change some settings in drivers and press benchmark button. To get high 2001 score, you have much more work to do, such as finding the best MHz/timing/drivers setting for every single test.

Sometimes as a writer you just get the feeling that somehow, you have written that headline before. Today is a great example. Here’s some news about a new World Record in the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme benchmark from non other than k|ngp|n, surely the meanest GPU pusher in the world right now. What is even more remarkable about the score is the fact that it busts right through the 40K barrier like a hot knife through butter. The new world record score for Fire Strike Extreme now sits at 41,297 marks.

It’s perhaps not entirely surprising to find Vince at the helm of this benchmark, as there are not too many overclockers in possession of four Nvidia Titan X Pascal cards. Vince managed to get his top-end SLI rig to top out with all four GP102 chips humming away at a very tasty 2,350MHz a piece, a very nice +65% beyond stock settings. GPU memory was tweaked to 1,480MHz (+18.4%). The rig was pushed by a Core i7 6950X clocked at 5,147MHz which is a pretty incredible +71.57% beyond Broadwell-E specs.

When I say that k|ngp|n is the master of the this particular benchmark, consider the chronicles of this year alone. In January of this year he managed a recording breaking score of 35,067 marks using four GTX 980Ti cards. Move forward to April and he is again pushed the World Record, this time to 36,264 marks. He followed this up in June with an i7 6950X with all ten cores pumped to 5,200MHz (+73.33%) scoring 36,626 marks. Let’s just say it’s a benchmark he knows well.

The new World Record score from k|ngp|n earns him 100 points for the benchmark world ranking, plus an additional 30 for the 4x GPU hardware ranking. He currently sits in third place in the overall HWBOT rankings.Check out the new 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme World Record here.

“Today we can confirm plans to host the first ever HWBOT Would Tour event on the West Coast of North America. The HWBOT World Tour Las Vegas event will be held at the GIGABYTE Suites on January 5th and 6th during the CES 2017 trade show. The event will start with a ‘Performance Matters’ launch event (with demos, speeches and a full blown party) followed by two days of overclocking workshops and contests, including the first Overclocking World Championship Qualifier.”

“The Overclocking World Championship Qualifier will be sponsored by GIGABYTE, Intel and Seasonic and is open to all Overclockers. Day one will feature a qualification round where Overclockers battle it out across three benchmarks in just three hours. The round will involve three benchmarks with Overclockers given processors from Intel’s latest product portfolio plus the latest motherboards from GIGABYTE. The top four will be invited to return for the Semi-Finals and Finals which will be based on the same 1v1 structure used in previous World Tour events.”

Just in case you recently returned from a lengthy trip down the Amazon basin or perhaps a custodial sentence at one of her majesty’s finest institutions, here’s a quick breakdown of what the HWBOT World Championship actually is. It’s basically the World Cup for individual (not team) overclocking and also the climax of the HWBOT World Tour 2016. It’s a contest where all of 2016’s World Series winners battle it out to decide who will become the HWBOT World Champion of 2016. Six World Series winners were joined by the winner of the HWBOT Wild Card contest plus the winner of the ROG Camp 2016 contest.

After a full day of qualification, Quarter-Finals and Semi-Finals, the contest came down to just two men. Marc and XA. The coverage from OverClockingTV covers the entire 1v1 battle royale in detail with some great commentary from Trouffman and Buildzoid.

Let’s start with look at the Official World Rankings on OC-ESPORTS and compare the standings with last month. These rankings are based on the performance of individual overclockers throughout the last twelve months, i.e. this season. Points are gained via participation in all contests hosted on OC-ESPORTS. Higher rankings in top level competitions earn you more points. You can find more details about the scoring and ranking system on OC-ESPORTS here.

At the top of the table it’s absolutely no surprise to find that Germany’s Dancop still leads the way by quite a substantial margin. With a points haul of 988, he remains substantially ahead of his nearest rival. However things have had a shake up at the top of table mostly due to the fact that Qualification Round of the HWBOT World Championship is a level 3 contest with plenty of points to fight for.

The popular Old School is Best School contest returns on December 15, kicking off the third season of the most retro overlocking ever created. Season 3 will feature a total of 5 Rounds, each with threes stages revolving around a uniquely devised pairing of classic hardware and classic benchmark. Round 1 is just a few weeks away, running from December 15th to January 15th 2017.

Just in case you are unfamiliar with the concept of the Old School is Best School contest, let me give you a quick rundown of what it’s all about. It’s a contest series created specifically for overclockers that enjoy benching on very old, classic hardware. Each month-long round features five stages, each with unique hardware and benchmarks.Let’s take a look at each of the Rounds and Stage devised for Season 3.

In Week 49 of 2016, we received 4189 benchmark results from 1030 registered overclockers around the world. The majority of the submissions is coming from Rookie overclockers representing 65% of the active community. They were responsible for 38% of the submissions. We had a peek at the most valuable submissions in a breakdown per league.

The overclocking pace is picking up after two slow weeks with five golden cups in the leaderboard. Dancop took down the 3DMark03 World Record with NVIDIA TITAN X Pascal at 2265/3000 MHz. He also scored a Global First Place in the Cinebench R15 10xCPU with a Core i7 6950X clocked at 5292 MHz. In the hardware rankings we find the usual suspect [MSI] OGS from Greece. They score a golden cup in the AMD Radeon HD 5850 category with the card clocked at 1300/1330 MHz. The AMD VGA is paired with an Intel Core i5 6600K clocked at 6300 MHz. We also find True Monkey from Germany on the leaderboard. He grabs first place in the Core i5 3470 XTU category. Last but not least we also see Poparamiro pop up. His GeForce GTX 470 at 1135/1140 MHz gives enough fire power to place top spot in the 3DMark03 ranking. Congratulations to everyone who made it on the leaderboard this week!

The overclocking results submitted during Week 49 generated in total 210 World Record Points, 3849.4 Global Points, and 7932.6 Hardware Points. The distribution per League is as follows: 8% for Elite, 33% for Extreme, 16% for Apprentice, 25% for Enthusiast, 5% for Novice, and 29% for Rookie. The representation of the active community is as follows: 2% Elite, 6% Extreme, 3% Apprentice, 16% Enthusiast, 8% Novice, and 65% Rookie.

The World Championship 2016 Final has now drawn to a close. Canada’s Marc0053 has just been crowned the official HWBOT World Champion of 2016. In second place we have Poland’s Xtreme Addict, while in third place we find DrWeez of South Africa. Let’s take a look in a bit more detail at the winners, scores, the blood, sweat and tears that helped make the event one of the most exciting days of the year.

In terms of overclocking 2016 will almost certainly go down as one of the biggest years ever, not least of all because of the HWBOT World Tour 2016, the most expansive series of HWBOT-run overclocking events ever done. The climax of the World Tour is of course the World Championship Final, a contest where all of this year’s World Series winners battle it out become the HWBOT World Champion 2016.

The first part of the contest is actually more similar to time trials in Formula 1 racing than a true qualification round. Eight overclockers were asked to compete on three benchmarks withe the final standings used as the basis for deciding who face who in the following 1v1 elimination rounds. Obviously, there was perceived advantage for finishing higher up the table and therefore facing an opponent from further down the table.